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This ridiculously Getty-ish image is the real-life view that greeted me at 6.30am yesterday morning. That’s Batak Lake in the Rhodope Mountains, to the south of Bulgaria. It’s just as pretty in person.

By this lake I finished Carl Wilson’s Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste, a wonderfully witty, insightful and moving dissection of Celine Dion’s divisive superstardom and how privilege, prejudice and our own personal stories lurk beneath ideas of taste. Many of Wilson’s lines thrilled me but this one near finished me off: “Just as churches say God saves every miserable sinner, the secular lesson is that time doesn’t leave anybody out either: no matter how stuck you feel, you still get to go to the future.” [Thanks, Caspar.]

I ran from Wilson’s arms right into Janet Frame’s. The third volume of her autobiography, in fact; a going away gift from Zillakiller. Frame strips bare to the bones in the telling of her story, inviting us into a world strung together with taut red ligaments. So much stung but especially this serendipitous line: “a life supervised, blessed and made lonely by the sky”.